Entrée en matière

Fulvia Carnevale

The selection found here was guided by nothing more substantial than my taste, my pleasure, an emotion, laughter, surprise, a certain dread, or some other feeling whose intensity I might have trouble justifying, now that the first moment of discovery has passed.

Michel Foucault, The Lives of Infamous Men (1977)

“The most disconcerting things are not those that we have never known, but those that we once knew and have since forgotten.” This sentence can be found in the fourth chapter of Non credere di avere dei diritti (Don’t Believe You Have Any Rights) published in 1987 by the Women’s Library of Milan. It reflects, to our mind, the very conditions of the documents that we have chosen to present here-all prisoners in limbo of a selective amnesia, against which they struggle unsuccessfully. If we were to single out a common trait that brings them together, we could say that they are excerpts from books written by women on women. Rather than affirmations of a particular standpoint or articulations of a political position, what can be found here are explorations of fragile zones, unresolved problems and the proof of existential strength.

The choice of these texts is not a response to any given philological criterion, nor to the ambition of faithfully accounting for one section of a complex political web rather than another-one that is too complex to be reduced to the scarcity of its written traces. If we can express a desire here it is that these words arise, beyond their academic classification, in their ignorant beauty, in their literary precariousness and in their power of evoking an infinitely fragile and sometimes barely invented potential for survival. Our intention is also to contribute, albeit modestly, to a visual and oral history of the present, and to restore a few fragments of certain women’s attempts, in Italy during the 1970s, to retake possession of themselves and thus transform the world. These are not exemplary texts, but they are memorable, burdened by the limits of the developments of their time, written in a language wrested from embarrassed silences.

Other practices of freedom, no less important, coexisted in the same period of time and in the same country as the ones we are presenting here, sometimes even in open conflict with the lived experience of these rebels within the revolt. It is not our intention here to draw up a detailed map of this situation, nor is it our desire to elevate ourselves above this still palpable and wounded past in order to give a detached and clinical vision of it. We have tried, however, to extract, while struggling with the difficulties of translation, some specific feelings, some scraps of intensity from a time when creating an experience of self-made freedom was possible.

The self-production of the circumstances through which the transformation of the self and others became possible is, to our mind, one of the most contemporary aspects of these writings and, at the same time, the furthest from our current situation. Certainly the space of subjectivity, at the time these texts were written, was less colonized by various techniques of the self, which had just begun to surface. Yet, as such, it was more difficult to approach from a non-therapeutic perspective, and it was harder to approach it as a battlefield. Yet something can be found in these precarious forms of knowledge, born out of self-consciousness and feminist collectives, that remains fresh and open to anyone, something that resists the masters’ authority and remains close to the pioneer euphoria of those discoveries that forever resist becoming colonialist.

The winds of freedom that can be felt throughout these writings flow precisely from their disorder and their freshness, which the passage of the time has not weakened. There is theft, (mis)appropriation of use: nothing was conceived to serve as a tool for women’s emancipation—least of all psychoanalysis. And nothing—if not the sharing of their own desire—helped them to free themselves of an image that they no longer wanted to resemble.

Since then very little has changed. The refusal in this short introduction to account for the historical and cultural inscription of these essays is justified by the fact that they represent so many attacks on those fictions that, in academia, are called History and Culture. The reader can, if she wishes to do so, complete this work herself, or alternatively she can allow these words to resonate with her own history and everything that she constantly fails to remember of it.

Seen through the prism of these experiences, History reveals itself as an obscure and visceral mass of instincts for war and rape, desires of women for men and for other women, segregation and relations of force that can be found even in love and motherhood. This is History in its entirety stripped of all honours and medals, emptied of the glory of heroes and dragged through filthy kitchens, sleepless nights watching over cradles, “beds-work stations” and “houses-factories.”

History recounted as trauma should be taught in schools so that it is no longer possible to ignore the fact that genocides, wars and exterminations begin as family affairs before they become events on a national and planetary scale. To begin to do this, it would be necessary to reopen a field of research, if only to study the words that are to be employed to name the tunnel to which the feminine is constantly relegated. These words more closely resemble blades that are constantly in need of sharpening rather than assets to be accumulated and transmitted as goods and property. As a journey undertaken together with makeshift means, autobiography has been the only adventure that has enabled access to what Luisa Muraro calls “the symbolic order.” The weight of individuality within the collective dynamic has acquired a different value in these narratives, which nobody wanted to listen to, and where bodies formed of words and meaning—to be seen and desired differently, and finally understood—take shape.

Vocabulary had not, up until then, been a source of weaponry for women, nor, even occasionally, had it been their toolbox. In the same way, History will not be their story until they are able to systematically explore the numerous and hidden contacts between the events of their lives and those that are described in books, courts and universities.

The history of the defeated is not only that which, as Foucault clearly explains, its protagonists themselves cannot tell.1 It is also one of both moral and material loss: the banishment of lived experience; an obligation, never formulated yet always imposed with violence, to be accounted for and administrated by others; to become the collaborators of a class, a race, a sex or a situation, in order to survive, but at the price of being neutralized and destroyed. This is, in fact, the history of how the conditions for the impossibility of love are created, by replacing love with the most extreme form of poverty: the deep-seated and ineradicable fear of being rejected. In this sense, the legend of complementarity between the feminine and the masculine has embellished the Pax Romana of Patriarchy. The truth is that in order to declare war, one has to be able to afford to have enemies, thus women will be charged for centuries to come with the responsibility for reconciliation and domestic peace. As Lia wrote, in 1976, in one of the Sottosopra, the non-political digs tunnels that we do not have to fill with earth, for it is the very definition of the “political” that is at stake in every insurrection or social movement. People, ultimately, struggle to enlarge the spectrum of this definition, for whenever facts and feelings start to carry the name of political, they fall into the miraculous hands of the masses; they become shareable and accessible: they are transfigured.

“I remember—said a woman named Ma—some school friends of mine who were singled out to me as models of femininity, the same as their mothers, like Russian dolls. […] It is as if, for some women, the egg had never been hatched; as if they had passed from one night to another, from mother to daughter,
and then again from daughter to mother, in a continuous chain inside an endless tunnel.”2 It is the fragments that have shattered in this night that have been captured by these texts, for example in the discussions that were held by a disparate group that formed around Lea Melandri, in which it is not only the past that is recalled, but its degree of reality once the present has erased its conquests.

How does one live in a world that, for a moment, one was able to change, but that has since fallen back on its own ignorance and its ruined certitudes? How can one accept the defeat of something that was unable to flower, like a mortal disease of a young child? These questions linger, repeat themselves, come and go, sometimes without grace, but full of interest, of which we have left nothing out, knowing that it was already a question of summaries and transcriptions, and that the inadequacy of their oral form, in a certain sense, gave presence to talking bodies.

Among the extracts collected in the anthology A zig zag, published in 1978, within the context of the work undertaken by the Sexuality and Writing Group in Milan, is a commentary by Lea Melandri: “We were aware of using the words of others, in forcing them into the interpretative task of underlining what went unsaid-knowledge nurtured under oppression-but also the glimmer of a knowledge produced by the extremely slow transformation in the relationship between ourselves and other women. In this analysis of writings, we realized that we had plundered the entire analytical culture of man, but also that this plundering had been solitary and disorganized: given our history and culture, each of us had often unconsciously used the words that were the most familiar to her.”3 Here, we have tried to redistribute a part of the spoils.

If feminism can be evoked as a missing lover, or as a standpoint that, as such, does not exist-as a placard on the door of the Women’s Library in Milan at the time suggested-or if it is something that concerns no one outside the small group of women that created it, because we always create our own freedom and never receive it from the authorities in charge, these questions will not find their answers here.

“Autonomy and the Need for Love,” the text that revolves around Carla Lonzi’s book Vai pure (Now You Can Go), is essential to us, in that it questions the relationship between artistic work and desire. It sheds light on the gap that divides the work of love from what society defines as valuable work. This is rendered in a simple and brutally autobiographical way: a personal break-up becomes a case study, a paradigm of public interest, in that rather than mourning the end of an amorous relationship, we end up questioning the illusions that made it possible and necessary, and, with the risk of becoming as vulgar as life itself, the price that we pay in order for love to endure as it does between men and women today.

The line that divides the personal from the collective, the sentimental from the political, is constantly put under erasure in these texts. Antonella Nappi’s The Nudity is exemplary in this respect: reclaiming one’s own body as a woman is a group activity and it takes place by administering an injection of reality that alone is capable of opposing the propaganda of commercialized bodies.

Materialism begins with the knowledge of one’s own body, with the awareness that the image of the body influences thought, in the same way that our thinking affects our physical appearance. We can thus perceive the outlines of the visual-voyeuristic circle in which women have been held prisoner since the time when images began to be reproduced; each alone with her billions of photographic “sisters,” none of whom resemble her, but whom she is obliged to resemble. To break this spell, each woman needs to find another mirror, to look at herself and take herself as her own object of study, as she finds herself, refusing to systematically change. And, paradoxically, it is here that real change starts to take place.

We end this brief introduction with a quote-full of doubts and profoundly modest-from Lea Melandri: “It is difficult to judge to what extent the practice of the unconscious could have progressed; as an idea it could have evolved and given rise to a more general interpretation of the world. We have briefly seen, during a short and very intense period, that a change in certain lives could take place and that this change could give rise to a specifically feminine knowledge. Something new was in the process of emerging through the combination of theory and practice, via a generalization that, each time, began with fragments of experience, which were recounted and transformed into objects of reflection.”4 The wager that we make here is that this “something” is still in force, still dormant, and ready to be activated.

Translated from French by Dean Inkster

1. Michel Foucault, “La torture, c’est la raison,” Dits et Écrits, III (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 390 – 391.

2. Lea Melandri, Una visceralità indicibile (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2000), 116.

3. Ibid., 127.

4. Ibid., p. 104.